The Gaza hospital attack and the BBC
by David Herman, The Article:
John Ware was a distinguished reporter for the BBC for almost thirty years and on Saturday wrote an excellent piece for The Article on the problems the BBC got itself into over impartiality, especially over is refusal to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. Since then the BBC has got itself into another, much more serious, mess over Tuesday’s missile attack on the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City.
The chief culprit, surprisingly, was The Context on the BBC’s News Channel. Presented by Christian Fraser, a fine broadcaster who has been at the BBC for more than twenty years, The Context runs from 8.00-9.50 pm every weekday evening. Fraser and the programme are both particularly strong on American politics and The Context will be a must-watch programme next year in the run-up to the US Elections.
However, last night’s programme highlighted all the problems BBC News has had with its coverage of the current crisis in the Middle East. First, too often BBC programmes have relied on spokesmen and women for NGOs and UN organisations, assuming that they are impartial observers. In fact, they rarely are. They emote about Palestinian civilians, but rarely mention Hamas or Islamic Jihad and are never asked about what has happened to the huge sums of humanitarian aid which have ended up in the pockets of Hamas leaders or have been spent by Hamas on weapons used to kill Israeli civilians.
Second, there is an obvious problem with finding impartial Palestinian eyewitnesses in Gaza who speak good English. The producers of The Context presumably thought they had solved the problem by arranging interviews with two Palestinian doctors. Both were understandably emotional but not especially impartial, with the first speaking of Palestinian “martyrs”, a clearly loaded term.
As Mark Regev, former ambassador to the UK and Israel’s most articulate spokesman, pointed out: there is no civil society in Gaza, so academics and senior doctors are unlikely to take an independent view and criticise Hamas. To compound matters, one of the Palestinian doctors was not in fact an eyewitness and had merely spoken to a fellow-doctor on the phone.
Amazingly, Regev was the only Israeli spokesman during the programme, but there were quite a few spokespeople for humanitarian relief organisations as well as the two Palestinian doctors: all blamed Israel for the attack, despite the lack of evidence.
Thirdly, there was a problem with video footage throughout the programme.
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